Simon Says – Musings of a Technology CTO

This week CNET News contributor Jon Oltsik blogged about how he believes that now there’s a unified standard for hardware disk encryption, governments should lead the transition to self-encrypting hard disks. Jon makes the point that hardware encryption is simple, fast, and generally more secure than software encryption.

While it would be admirable to see any government protect their data, Jon in my opinion missed the big point: the benefit of the standard is really common key management between all the different vendors. No one really gets any benefit from the drives doing the encryption the same way – as long as it’s a “good” way, who cares? But, if all the drives have a common key management architecture, it makes the provisioning and, more importantly, the recovery of data much simpler. Read more…